Modern motor vehicle heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems are efficient, effective mechanisms for removing vehicle-exterior or ambient air contaminants, conditioning that air as needed, and providing the conditioned air to a motor vehicle passenger cabin. Because vehicle HVAC systems rely solely on ambient air as an air source, they are typically provided with a variety of filters for removing contaminants from ambient air prior to passing the conditioned air to the passenger cabin interior.
Because of global concerns with ambient air quality, particularly in heavily industrialized and populated areas, vehicles may also be provided with sensors for detecting air contaminants. A particular concern in this regard is fine particulate matter (PM) contaminants such as PM2.5 particles and PM10 particles. However, such sensors are very expensive and disadvantageously only provide highly localized readings, i.e. a measure of air quality only at discrete locations in the passenger cabin rather than a cabin-wide air quality metric. Because of this, in addition to the often prohibitive cost of such sensors, significant engineering challenges are inherent in passenger cabin placement and sampling quality of particulate sensors.
Accordingly, a need is identified in the art for systems and methods for determining passenger cabin air quality. Such methods and systems advantageously should require minimal reliance on expensive particulate sensor technology, and further should allow real-time displays of vehicle interior air quality to vehicle passengers and others.
To solve this and other problems, the present disclosure relates to methods for determining vehicle interior cabin filtration performance and for providing indicators of passenger cabin particulate concentrations, and to systems for implementing the methods. Advantageously, the described systems and methods require minimal sensor technology, and in particular do not rely on expensive automotive grade particulate sensors.